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The new and highly anticipated Apple TV series Pluribus from Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, asks a simple question.
What if a proud misanthrope suddenly found herself truly alone?
Pluribus stars Ray Sehorne, a Gilligan veteran from Better Call Saul, in a tour-de-force performance as a miserable romantic author who escapes an event that swallows practically everyone on Earth.
It's a creepy, lonely, darkly funny look at loss and what makes us human.
I'm Glenn Weldon.
And I'm Linda Holmes.
And today we're talking about Pluribus on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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Joining us today is our co-host Aisha Harris.
Hello, Aisha.
Hello, Linda.
And I can assure you I have not been taken by these, whatever this is, this virus.
I am me.
Absolutely.
You are you.
I am me.
Glenn is Glenn.
And I'm so glad.
As Pluribus was approaching its premiere, Apple was very cagey concerning its premise.
But with the first two episodes available, we are going to talk about that premise as it's revealed up to that point.
Ray Sehorne plays Carol Sturka, a romanticist author who's bored by her latest book tour and no longer proud of her work.
She dislikes almost everything, in fact, except her beloved wife Helen, who is played by Miriam Shore.
She's also her agent.
Yeah.
Best book tour.
What is that?
Is that like best stomach cancer?
You endure it.
You do not toast it.
Oh, how I hate all those paying customers showering me with love and respect.
Why do I have to make so much money?
How do you bear it?
Everyone in the bar where Carol and Helen are having a drink everyone that is except for Carol falls into a sort of a trance.
And while most of them eventually wake up profoundly changed, some never wake up at all, including Helen.
As it turns out, alien technology has allowed a virus-like phenomenon to spread throughout the population.
What that phenomenon does is join every person in the world into a single being, a single bland smiling ingratiating cooperating, all-knowing being, of which everyone who was once an individual is is now just a representative.
Carol, for unknown reasons, is immune, but the world around her is effectively gone, as everyone has other things on their minds than grocery shopping or the ordinary day-to-day.
Confused and terrified, and grieving the loss of her wife.
Carol lashes out at the weirdos who contact her through her phone and her TV, speaking for the amorphous blob of humanity.
They assure her she would be much happier if she joined.
The show is funny and strange and incredibly lonely, and it's as in love with the sky in Carol's hometown of Albuquerque as the rest of Vince Gilligan's recent work.
Pluribus is streaming now on Apple TV.
Glenn, when I first saw this show and I saw that it was about a heroic misanthrope who is also a really good person I thought
I feel like this is going to be a Glenn show.
What did you think about Pluribus?
Yeah, I got the premise right away.
Although the logline is the most miserable person on earth must save the world from happiness.
Even I was concerned about that, because how do you empathize with someone who is miserable for hours and hours and hours?
How do we understand why a miserable person would want to stew in her own misery instead of embracing the hive mind?
Ray Sehorne is how.
I've said this before.
She is the empathy cheat code.
She gets you invested.
She makes Carol tough but vulnerable, smart and very self-aware.
But she's got things about herself that she just can't see, because eventually she does meet up with some other people who did not join with the hive mind and she is just – hilariously terrible with them.
I'm not sure that's entirely on her, because some of them seem like pretty awful people.
But even that might be a result of me identifying so hard with Carol.
I've got a lot of questions about this world-building man, but that's because I'm a nerd.
I don't know how many of those questions are going to be addressed directly.
We might talk about that later, but...
Listeners should know here is the service journalism part.
This is Vince Gilligan being given a blank check, to quote a phrase, and he's going to cash it.
That means he's going to show us process.
He's going to show us things that do little to no narrative work, but all kinds of aesthetic work, at least theoretically.
Is he always in control of that tension?
I don't know.
I mean, will you be tempted to hit that 10 to 15 second skip button once you realize that he shows us a car starting to go down a road and we're going to be watching that car go down that road?
Or
As happens in the second episode, he's going to eat up seven minutes of screen time as we watch somebody travel silently across the globe.
I sometimes get frustrated with the experience of watching this show, but I love the experience of thinking about it.
Because, at the end of the day, the show is funny, because it needs to be, and they know it needs to be.
And baked into the premise is something that's really smart, something they've only started to tease out.
And I'm not sure if we're going to get much more of it in this first season.
It's already been picked up for a second season.
We'll see.
But one way she can fight back is by having very strong negative feelings.
And that, of course, is Carol's whole shtick.
That is her thing.
And she's got another superpower, which is that they don't know what she's thinking.
But her kryptonite is that she's uniquely terrible at hiding what she's thinking.
That is a fascinating, really interesting, smart tension that you can build a whole show around.
And I'm going to be here for as long as this thing goes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Ayesha, what did you think?
I mean, I think I fall very much in the same boat as Glenn does.
Ray Sehorne makes or breaks this experience.
And if it was anyone else besides her in this role, I'm not sure I would have the patience for what is happening here.
I love the idea.
I love the premise.
I love this kind of attempt to examine how we interact with our world and how someone who doesn't like the world really and suddenly finds themselves faced with a world that is willing to do pretty much anything.
And like that is interesting to me.
But Vince Gilligan himself has says he's not exactly sure how he's going to explain some things, because the world building is my biggest issue with this.
What I do love is the fact that Ray Sehorne is able to, even in those moments of process when she's the one who we are seeing this process through, and I can't help but enjoy it, because she's not going to give us full silence.
She's going to give us some grunts.
She's going to give us some reactions.
There's a moment where she says nonsense words and just the way she delivers it is kind of perfect.
That is what I'm here for and that is what I'm loving and the world building stuff a little less so.
But Linda, I want to hear how you feel about this.
Yeah.
So I started watching this and I
I had really complicated feelings about it because I knew how good I thought it was.
And I knew how good I thought Ray Sehorne was.
And I know how much I love the way that Gilligan presents particularly Albuquerque, just his love of that kind of landscape.
And yet I was really sitting there thinking, like, I'm uncomfortable watching this.
And I think it just really got to me how lonely it is.
I think it is one of the saddest moments things I have maybe ever watched on television, not just because it begins with the loss of her wife.
And in a lot of shows the grief of losing her wife would essentially be the plot of the rest of the show and could be right.
But on top of all of that, they're very specific about the mechanics of what would happen if someone that you loved died under these circumstances.
What do you do with the body?
Because this hive mind that has developed this, or whatever it is, has a plan for what to do with the people who have died, of whom, as it turns out, there are quite a lot.
But you may not want to do that.
So there's a whole thing about just the physical experience of a death that you have to manage on your own.
That I found very sad.
But really as it settles in the fact that this woman has no one to talk to, and I found the sadness of it so oppressive that at times It was just too much for me.
But that says nothing about the quality of it, which I think is exceptional.
I am the one who put the words tour de force in the intro to this show.
That's really what this is.
This is her pretty much the whole time.
I am blown out of my penny loafers, as one of my English teachers used to say, by the quality of this performance and the visual language of Vince Gilligan.
Yeah.
And I think that's...
Yeah, this is a genre of like, if you think about it on the surface, it's just pod people, right?
Conform to us, you know, become one of the hive mind.
And the show is so much more than that because of this notion that people don't really go away.
They just join up.
And that's really fun to think about because it raises questions like obviously she doesn't have a job anymore because she's a writer and writing goes away.
The entire human race knows everything.
Everybody else knows.
So communicating nonverbally means art doesn't exist.
Music doesn't exist.
Prose, poetry, everything.
Interiority doesn't exist, which sounds scary.
But then you realize that means dishonesty and hate and envy and greed.
And that means privilege doesn't exist.
And if greed and privilege doesn't exist, then money doesn't exist either.
Mental illness, does that just go away?
Addiction is a biological thing.
Does that go away?
The cornerstone of politics is persuasion.
You don't need to persuade people anymore what happens to politics.
Does all their knowledge go away?
Because what we're doing here is we're getting rid of the self, right?
Yes, we're getting rid of the self.
And if we're doing that, that means that if you're reducing people to the information well, you have to understand, as we've learned in the last few years, that people's information, what they believe, is influenced by what you know, how they feel about it, versus what they actually know in terms of objectively.
What about sexuality?
What about gender?
What about queerness?
You know, queerness threw up a lot of roadblocks in my life, but I wouldn't part with it for anything.
I love it.
And this is going to sound cold, but this is kind of the science fiction angle of it.
But aren't there redundancies?
If you do a hostile takeover of the earth and humanity, there's going to be layoffs, because if the self goes away and people are reduced to just the stuff they know, there's going to be a hell of a pretty much the same thing.
I don't think there are people at all.
I think the whole idea is that there aren't people anymore.
There is one being and it just is distributed in the same way that there are like a bunch of McDonald's franchises, right?
Like everybody is just a franchise of that hive mind because they all operate exactly the same way.
They all have exactly the same knowledge.
It's an elimination of the self.
And I compared it to Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Like, where is everyone living?
Like, are they still married to each other if they were married?
What are they doing?
Yes.
Those are the things that I sort of wondered in the many long process sequences and silences.
And I'm like OK, what are they doing when they're not interacting with Carol or these other people who have been immune to this?
But the bigger struggle I have with this.
I didn't quite know what it was that was missing, until there's a moment.
I won't get into the details because it's a later episode that hasn't aired yet.
But there is a moment where another character who, like Carol, is immune, has just a very brief moment with someone in their life, their personal life, who all of a sudden is very cheery and they're like you were terrible before.
I don't trust this.
And I feel like that is what's missing.
For Carol is that like was Helen, literally the only person in her life?
I'm not saying she had to have been close with someone else, but what about her parents?
Does she have any siblings?
Does she have any sort of like other colleagues or whatever?
Some of those questions might be answered or, if not answered, at least there'd be a little bit more tension or complications.
That i would love to see is like she had to have more than just her wife there.
How does that affect her character and the world?
And then that could open up more answers or at least more insight into what these other people are doing.
And maybe that's coming, but like it's, it's not here yet And I wanted that.
Yeah.
One of the elements that I find fascinating that I think allows people Right.
Being a misanthrope doesn't mean that you don't have other people in your life.
Of course.
So, like in many ways, just as this hive mind is kind of a metaphor, Carol herself is kind of a metaphor, right.
Yeah.
But thematically, one of the things I found interesting is that this hive mind is very kind of fixated, particularly in the beginning, on telling Carol you can have anything you want, right.
We'll get you anything you want.
Because the world now contains no friction.
And as Glenn said, there's no greed.
There's no need.
I think the show goes out of its way at one point to have somebody point out whatever you think has been lost.
There's not racism in this way of living.
There's not violence.
There's not prison.
Right. there's not crime, right?
It's a very, very profound question to me.
To what degree would you choose abundance and indulgence over your humanity as a person and your individuality?
Because this is science fiction, but there are people who answer versions of that question every day.
There's what the show seems to be about and what it's really about.
And There's what the joined humans tell Carol it's about and what's it really, I think, eventually going to become about?
Because what the show seems to be saying, and what the joined humans seem to be saying, is that empathy cures everything.
Problem is this is not empathy because it's not about imagining what someone else is feeling.
It's knowing it.
I think the only thing that makes empathy so important, rare and good and powerful is that it's something you have to actively choose.
It is the sign of an evolved mind.
It's an act of imagination.
When imagination is gone, all you have left is this is hierarchy, is bees fulfilling roles, unquestioningly.
And so is it a good thing?
I think we're going to find out it really, really is.
Yeah.
And I think, aside from Ray Sehorne, I think that is what keeps me invested in this, because I do think it's such a really great question to be asking.
Or just a thought to have is, like, be careful what you wish for.
And this isn't what Carol has wished for.
But this idea of, you know, everyone getting along and kumbaya and blah, blah, blah.
Like, there are tradeoffs to that.
And are the tradeoffs worth it?
At one point we find out that I think it's in the second episode almost a billion people died when this happened.
Sure, only a handful of people are immune to it.
But that still affects them. there is still grief to be had.
There is still something to be felt.
And you know, pluribus e pluribus unum.
You know, like this idea that what's good for most of us, even though this is, they make it very clear this is one being.
Anytime they're speaking, they say we, but it means like we are one and one are we.
Like we have to consider every aspect and every angle.
And I think that what I love about this is the fact that it shows that getting rid of all of that friction can actually be, like you said Linda, extremely lonely.
It can be very debilitating.
It can be your worst nightmare.
And I think there's something to be said for that.
As much as I would love for things like racism to go away, also, like, do I want art to go away?
No.
That's terrifying.
And I think there's an interesting question of if you care about closeness to other people.
I mean, I think this being defines closeness to other people as just everybody getting what they want or everybody getting enough lack of friction.
But I think for Carol, the existence of conflict is part of humanity.
And I think many people have experienced in their own life can you really be close to somebody that you've never disagreed with or had any differences with, ever right?
Mm-hmm.
The odd thing about her being presented as a misanthrope is that she turns out to be the person who values other people the most.
Because she's the one from the beginning who's like, I want to undo this.
Like, I want to put things back how they were.
They built into the premise.
So she's a misanthrope.
She wants to be left alone.
Well, she doesn't want to be left alone.
She just wants to be left alone with Helen.
And Helen goes away.
And the way they pitch her on joining the hive mind is it's the end of loneliness.
And she needs to go through a time –
I would imagine, of actual loneliness before it even becomes something she would consider.
And then it becomes something she can't even possibly consider, because she knows it's not the end to loneliness.
It's the beginning of something else.
And it's smart on paper, smart in execution.
I do love Ray Sehorne, man.
She is a wonder.
Absolutely.
And it's great that Gilligan made the show for her, because obviously he's like she should have gotten an Emmy.
I'm going to get her a damn Emmy.
I think that's really admirable.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like I said, I started off thinking I was a skeptic about this show and I came around hard as I watched it.
Anyway, I think we all like this show and definitely think it is extremely interesting to think about and talk about.
Tell us what you think about Pluribus.
Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash pchh.
That brings us to the end of our show.
Aisha Harris, Glenn Weldon, thank you so much for being here.
I treasure your individuality. even when we have had friction.
Thank you, Linda.
Thank you.
And just a reminder that signing up for Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus is a great way to support our show and public radio, and you get to listen to all of our episodes sponsor-free.
So please go find out more at plus.npr.org slash happy hour or visit the link in our show notes.
This episode is produced by Mike Katziff, Carly Rubin and Janae Morris and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy.
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Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
I'm Linda Holmes, and only Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.
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